Chapter 26
Itook a deep shuttering breath, let the thrill of panic whirl through me for a moment, then I shoved it down, down until I could no longer feel it. Until I was numb.
I am not afraid of vampires. They fear me.
I’d trained for this. I was ready. There were more than three. Maybe four. Wildlings didn’t usually travel in groups of more than that.
“Stay beside me,” Vander said.
I gripped my sword tighter, keeping at pace beside Vander.
We darted into the grove of pines and the first scream pierced my ears.
The whoosh of Vander’s blade silenced the man; his head plopped to the ground.
There were stories of decapitated vampires coming back to life, so Vander shoved his blade through the heart.
I put my back to his. A female with matted hair and tattered clothes sprinted at me, screeching until my ears rang. My heart thundered. I slashed at her, cutting off her reaching arm. She reared back with a wail, and I jabbed my sword through her heart. Two down.
“Left side,” Vander called out. Three more hurtled between trees, trying to hide themselves... or their number. I was wrong about there only being four. By the sounds of their feet, there might be a dozen still.
Vander and I moved as one, and when five vampires jumped out, fangs bared, I let my training take over.
I didn’t have to think. My feet moved; I swung my blade, slicing into flesh.
Blood arched through the darkness, glinting off the moonlight.
Even their screams and hisses didn’t disturb me.
My heart beat steadily like a drum. I thought only of striking lethal blows.
A slice to the throat, cut the back of the legs, they go down and stick a blade in the heart. It was a dance I’d memorized.
Gray stone bodies lay all around us, nine, ten, eleven.
Vander killed faster than me. When it went quiet with only the soft rustling of wind in the trees, I quickly scanned the shadows for more.
The tingle down my spine told me there was still at least one more.
The crunch of pine needles under feet pulled my attention right.
My breath caught. Two vampires, but not the filthy wildlings I’d always encountered.
The male was tall, regal, and handsome, with dark slicked-back hair, in a black suit with a coat tail that brushed the ground, and the woman was in a red top with puffed sleeves that cinched at her petite waist. Her long golden hair was half tied back in a style that tumbled down her like a waterfall.
A decorative swirl of rubies climbed up the side of her charcoal, thigh-high boots.
She smiled, revealing canines that brushed her full bottom lip.
They were carrying swords. Vander positioned himself partially in front of me. His back brushed against the front of my shoulder. Why weren’t we attacking? They were vampires in our land.
“You took all the fun. Not a single one left for us,” the male said in an aristocratic accent not unlike Vander’s and some of the other higher class in Nighthaven.
“Viper, handsome, you didn’t tell us you had a new partner,” the woman crooned.
“Or apprentice? That telltale silver ring on her uniform is pretty damning. Not to mention you’re guarding her,” the man added with a wicked smile. “I thought you’d given up on that? Belladonna grows weary of waiting for you to come home, brother.”
It felt like someone struck me in the gut with a cane. Brother? My entire body buzzed. Dread began to sink my stomach. If he had lied to me about his standing with Nocturnus and the vampires there, I was all but at his mercy.
I always had been anyway.
“Belladonna can burn in the underworld,” Vander spat.
The male winced and tsked. The woman cocked her head and inhaled. “Forget about that. This one smells... different. What are you, pet?”
My muscles strained and I froze. Was I bleeding? And why weren’t we ending this? When did we ever talk to the vampires before killing them? There were rules about attacking them in Nocturnus but not here.
“She is ducai,” Vander snapped. “Now leave before I change my mind. No one will miss you.”
The woman took a step toward us, eyes locked on me like I was her next meal. “Bonecarver. I like that name. I think your little pet would make a great addition. Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about changing her.”
Vander snarled and lunged at her with his sword.
She jerked back, shifting into a shadowy form like thick black smoke.
The male blocked Vander’s blade before it could slash through the shadows.
I moved in beside him. She reformed and I swung at her.
Our swords clashed hard. I kicked her in the gut and hacked at her head. She ducked and rolled to the side.
“The pet is good,” she grinned.
The male shifted into shadow, Vander jabbed left and shoved his sword through the man’s belly as he reformed. He hissed, stumbling backward and pressed a hand over the wound.
“No!” The woman shrieked and threw herself in front of Vander’s next strike. His blade stuck through her center. The man wailed with such pain it shook me as she fell into him.
Someone screamed nearby and my stomach swooped. A human scream for help. The distraction was just enough for the male vampire to turn and run in the opposite direction. The woman lay dying on the ground, gasping for breath. Vander took a step to go after him when another scream came.
“Help! Vampire!”
Instinctively I turned toward the cry, but Vander went the other way. I tilted back and forth. I had to stay with him, and yet he was ignoring someone who needed us.
“Wait! Oriana,” the vampire woman called. That stopped him. He whipped around, half shadowed from the moonlight shining down. She held a hand over her chest where blood pumped between her fingers. He must not have directly hit her heart.
“What about Oriana?” Vander glared down at her.
His sister’s name was Oriana...
She choked until liquid scarlet bubbled over her lips. Gray worked its way up her neck; her pale hands changed next. The vampire woman smiled as death overtook her, and she turned to stone.
My pulse hummed.
Vander started pacing until another scream for help ripped through the night. “Shit.” He growled, took my arm and dragged me toward the screams.
I dodged pine branches and leapt over a rotten log. “I bet she was trying to distract you from going after her friend.” That must be it. “But... you were going to let them go until she threatened me. Why?”
“There is an unwritten agreement that we don’t kill the vampires who are here to hunt down the groups of wildlings.”
“Is this your unwritten agreement or the guild’s?” I’d never heard anyone else talk about it.
He turned a sharp eye on me. The darkness in him terrified me—thrilled me. My body burned with heat. “It’s LOA’s.”
“They knew you,” I asserted. “He called you brother. Because you are a vampire like him, do you think?” The wheels of my mind spun. I trusted him. Jaeda trusted him, but what did I truly know about her other than she was a mage?
“Everyone knows me, Bonecarver. And I assume so.”
A young man ran toward us, fear carved into his face. “Help! Help! A vampire!” He threw himself at us and stumbled into me. I caught him before he fell. He couldn’t be more than fifteen.
“What are you doing out here?” I chastised, then I saw it glistening in the space between his shoulder and neck. A bite wound deep enough hints of bone showed. I shoved him off of me and stepped back. This was a fresh bite. My heart sank into the pit of my chest.
“It was back that way.” His arm shook pointing south. Vander’s blue eyes dropped to the boy’s neck, then shifted to me. “I was playing a game with some friends. It was stupid, stupid. They dared me to go out and then locked the door. They wouldn’t let me in!”
“I’m sorry,” I said softly. Truly, I was. “They are not your friends.” Friends wouldn’t do that when it was life or death.
The vampire shriek was close. I dragged the boy behind a tree trunk and Vander took the one beside us. A minute or so later, footsteps beat the ground.
“I smell him. Smell. Blood. Fresh. Where is it?” I peeked around the trunk and a filthy man with a scraggly beard stepped into the clearing between trees. The difference between the starved wildlings and the Nocturnus vampires was jarring.
“It’s here,” the boy whimpered. I put a finger to my mask over my lips, but it was too late, the vampire’s head snapped in our direction.
Vander slipped around behind him, and before the vampire could even turn to his approach, a blade stuck through his chest. The monster hit the ground with a sickening thud.
Vander stepped over the body and marched back toward us.
He looked plagued with duty. I knew what he planned to do.
“Wait.” I gripped the boy’s wrist and pulled him behind me. “What if he doesn’t change?”
“Everyone changes.” Vander sounded irritated.
“But what if he doesn’t? Can’t we wait to see? How long does it take?”
“A few hours. The wound heals, the fangs show, then he needs to drink.”
My breath was uneven, ragged. “It feels wrong to do it while he’s still...” The boy must have finally realized what we were arguing about and tugged. I gripped his wrist harder.
“I’m not waiting hours for the inevitable.”
“I want to go home,” the boy whined. “It’s not what it looks like. I’m sure my friends will let me in now.”
What if he was like me? Wasn’t there anyone else like me? “Viper, please.”
“Fine, we’ll wait and you’ll see the change when it happens. It will be a good lesson for you.” He roughly grabbed the boy’s arm, dragged him to a tree and shoved him against the coarse bark.
“I promise I won’t hurt anyone. I just want to go home and see my mother.”
My heart shattered. His mother. My mother. Mine was gone.
Vander jerked his arms back and tied them together behind the trunk.
“The ropes are hurting my wrists.”
Vander ignored him and leaned back against the tree opposite the boy, crossed his arms and watched. I kept an eye and ear on our surroundings, but the night was quiet now. Crickets chirped as we settled in silence. An owl hooted nearby.
“You’re assassins, aren’t you?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Am I going to be a vampire?”
“Yep,” Vander said, curtly.
“Are you going to kill me?”
“I’ll let you figure that out yourself.”
Tears streaked down his face. He lowered his chin to his chest and sobbed. As the boy cried for his mother, I wanted to side with Jaeda and her ideals to try to save vampires. I didn’t let myself shed a tear for him even if I wanted to.
After a while I thought he dozed off.
My heart ached when I watched his neck wound close and his head snap up. His eyes flared wide. His breathing changed, fast, too fast. He let out a scream like he was in pain and his body jerked strangely. Then he stilled; his gaze shifted to me.
The vampire scented my blood.
“Now you know.” Vander shoved his sword through the boy’s chest. I gasped and my hand flew over my mouth. The boy choked out a spatter of blood and wheezed his last breath. Gray covered his body, and he petrified against the bark.
I clenched my teeth and shoved down emotions that wanted to rise.
“It hurts the first time you watch someone change and have to kill them.” Vander cleaned off his blade on a nearby patch of moss. “Then you realize you saved his family who would have let him in not knowing what he was. Who knows how many more would die if he turned them.”
I blinked away my blurry vision and pushed my shoulders back. “Yet you were going to let those other vampires leave. I don’t understand this unspoken agreement, Viper. We take care of wildlings in our land, why would the vampire kings care to send anyone to help us?”
He shifted from one foot to the other. “They see vampires who don’t comply as the enemy. They don’t want the wildlings who don’t follow orders to take all their supply. Vampires aren’t allowed to change humans or ducai without permission from a superior and wildlings do what they want.”
I shook my head and started pacing. “So you’re saying they control their own lawbreakers the same way we do? But instead of prison, they just kill them.”
“That sums it up well.”
He tilted his head. “Come, we can talk on the way back.” I fell into step beside him, giving one last glance at the boy who would never get to see his mother again.
“You did well tonight, Bonecarver. I meant every word I told your father. After a few more hunts and passing the exam, you’ll be ready to graduate to level one assassin. ”
I smiled beneath my mask, but that nervousness twisted my gut again. “You’re not going to leave when that happens. Promise me.”
He went quiet. The silence was strained. I almost couldn’t bear it. I was ready to beg him to stay.
“He knows your name. If they target you because of me...”
My breath pulled from my lungs. I hadn’t thought about that.
“That’s why you killed her.”
“I should have killed the other one too. Should have just left the boy to die, he was going to die anyway.”
“You didn’t know that at the time.”
“You’re more important to me than some random human. I should have tracked that vampire down. He’s long gone now.”
“How do you know they don’t already know I’m your apprentice?
We go everywhere together and have for a long time.
” I stopped as realization hit me. “Did Dravyn target your sister to get to you? They knew you’d go after her.
” As the most deadly assassin in the League, they must have wanted him on their side or dead.
And they must want him even more now as the first daywalking vampire in nearly a century.
“That’s very likely to be the case.” His eyes showed sadness he rarely revealed to me. “I don’t want that to happen to you. I might have to leave. If I give them what they want—”
Fury ripped through me. “No. You can’t give in to them because of me,” I snarled.
“You can’t give them what they want. You are LOA until you die!
I could die any day, that’s the nature of being an assassin, that’s the way of this world.
So fight harder than ever, but don’t you dare give up.
I’m safer with you beside me. Would you leave me to deal with Beast and Dred on my own?
Who better to fight beside me on missions than you? ”
He faced me fully. His eyes glittered in the moonlight. One word could shatter my heart. An ache throbbed in my chest.
“Alright, Bonecarver. I promise I will fight harder than I ever have. For you.”